and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. "(Mark 4:26-27)We believe many things but don't always know how to implement them. We believe that human beings can grow into Gods; we accept the importance of coming to Christ and also of awakening our divine attributes and powers -- but how to do that seems obscure. Likely a list of spiritual to-do's ceases to serve. So we may find ourselves seeking a more fulfilling path -- but where to set our foot?In recent years, studies in adult developmental psychology have cast unexpected light on the path to Godhood. They illustrate that human beings already possess the potent seeds for unfolding into more highly developed beings. We learn that spiritual practices can shape the mind into and instrument for facilitating spiritual growth and experience, that is, for continuing from "grace to grace." Along the way, venturing into the unknown, we shed false concepts about ourselves, about our reality, and about God Himself.The purpose of this book is to explore the path of spiritual development.

    This is not as easy as one would imagine: She was born in the church, educated at BYU, married in the temple, and is raising more Mormons. She faced a serious conundrum: keep quiet (and avoid losing everything dear to her), or tell the world what being raised LDS does to a person's psyche, especially when they realize that everything they were taught and everything they hoped to believe is a lie. To expose the difficulty faced by Mormons who leave the Church and to seek support for their plight, Regina offers a first-person confessional memoir recounting her many atrocious experiences, managing to weave in enough humor to keep you turning pages, and enough brutal honesty to bring you to an understanding of what it is to be a Mormon, and to try to leave it behind...

    A snake-handling preacher by the name of Glendel Buford Summerford has just tried to murder his wife, Darlene, by snakebite. At gunpoint, he forces her to stick her arm in a box of rattlesnakes. She is bitten twice and nearly dies. The trial, which becomes a sensation throughout southern Appalachia, echoes familiar themes from a troubled secular world - marital infidelity, spouse abuse, and alcoholism - but it also raises questions about faith, forgiveness, redemption, and, of course, snakes. Glenn Summerford is convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. When Dennis Covington covered the trial of Glenn Summerford for The New York Times, a world far beyond the trial opened up to him. Salvation on Sand Mountain begins with a crime and a trial and then becomes an extraordinary exploration of a place, a people, and an author's descent into himself. The place is southern Appalachia - a country deep and unsettled, where the past and its culture collide with the economic and social realities of the present, leaving a residue of rootlessness, anxiety, and lawlessness. All-night video stores and tanning salons stand next to collapsed chicken farms and fundamentalist churches. The people are poor southern whites. Peculiar and insular, they are hill people of Scotch-Irish descent: religious mystics who cast out demons, speak in tongues, drink strychnine, run blowtorches up their arms, and drape themselves with rattlesnakes. There is Charles McGlocklin, the End-Time Evangelist; Cecil Esslinder, the red headed guitar player with the perpetual grin; Aunt Daisy, the prophetess; Brother Carl Porter; Elvis Presley Saylor;Gracie McAllister; Dewey Chafin; and the legendary Punkin Brown, all of whose faith illuminates these pages. And then there is Dennis Covington, himself Scotch-Irish, whose own family came down off of Sand Mountain two generations ago to work in the steel mills of Birmingham, and

    It is aimed at students encountering anthropology for the first time. Reviewers describe the text as vivid, rich, user-friendly, accessible, and well-organized. The text examines religious expression from a cross-cultural perspective while incorporating key theoretical concepts. In addition to providing a basic overview of anthropology, including definition of key terms and exposure to ethnographies, the text exposes students to the varying complexity of world religions.

    But one rogue researcher looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Franz Boas was the very image of a mad scientist: a wild-haired immigrant with a thick German accent. By the 1920s he was also the foundational thinker and public face of a new school of thought at Columbia University called cultural anthropology. He proposed that cultures did not exist on a continuum from primitive to advanced. Instead, every society solves the same basic problems--from childrearing to how to live well--with its own set of rules, beliefs, and taboos.Boas's students were some of the century's intellectual stars: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is one of the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans of the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now-classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped vanishing civilizations from the Arctic to the South Pacific and overturned the relationship between biology and behavior. Their work reshaped how we think of women and men, normalcy and deviance, and re-created our place in a world of many cultures and value systems. Gods of the Upper Air is a page-turning narrative of radical ideas and adventurous lives, a history rich in scandal, romance, and rivalry, and a genesis story of the fluid conceptions of identity that define our present moment.

    Laura M. Ahearn shows that young Nepalese people are applying their newly acquired literacy skills to love-letter writing, fostering a transition that involves not only a shift in marriage rituals, but also a change in how villagers conceive of their own ability to act and attribute responsibility for events. These developments have potential ramifications that extend far beyond the realm of marriage and well past the Himalayas.The love-letter correspondences examined by Ahearn also provide a deeper understanding of the social effects of literacy. While the acquisition of literary skills may open up new opportunities for some individuals, such skills can also impose new constraints, expectations, and disappointments. The increase in female literacy rates in Junigau in the 1990s made possible the emergence of new courtship practices and facilitated self-initiated marriages, but it also reinforced certain gender ideologies and undercut some avenues to social power, especially for women. Scholars, and students in such fields as anthropology, women's studies, linguistics, development studies, and South Asian studies will find this book ethnographically rich and theoretically insightful. Laura M. Ahearn is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University.

    

    This book has been designed for people who don't know how to pray yet or those who aren't sure whether they learned correctly or not. In this book you will learn the prayers by reading clear and simple descriptions of what to do along with pictures to make sure you understood correctly. One of the unique features of this book is that it doesn't limit itself to teaching the rituals behind the prayer only. Rather, there is an entire chapter dedicated to learning the meanings behind each statement and action in the prayer.

    He did not crave my company, cling to and cuddle me endlessly. He showed no need to bond with me, his father, and we did not. He exhausted me, he frustrated me and he scared me. I came to dread coming home from work sometimes, or those moments when it was my turn to wrestle him into bed and begin the long struggle to settle him. I said things that will forever haunt me, like “What is wrong with that child?” and “Is he always going to be this annoying?” What I didn't know then was that he was autistic.When that realisation came, so did the beginning of my mission to understand my son, and to understand autism. This book chronicles that search for understanding and answers. It documents one parent’s attempts to come to terms with, and accept, his child. It is raw and real, sometimes confused and frightened but also, I’d like to think, written with warmth and love and an ability to smile through difficult times.This book is for anyone starting out on a pathway with their child that they did not expect. It’s also for people who, like me, are a little further down that road but still learning, still asking questions and still getting it wrong sometimes. You are not alone.

    The controversial best-seller that sent Oxford University and Nature magazine into a frenzy has at last come to the United States. Shattering the Myths of Darwinism exposes the gaping holes in an ideology that has reigned unchallenged over the scientific world for a century. Darwinism is considered to be hard fact, the only acceptable explanation for the formation of life on Earth, but with keen insight and objectivity Richard Milton reveals that the theory totters atop a shambles of outdated and circumstantial evidence which in any less controversial field would have been questioned long ago. Sticking to the facts at hand and tackling a vast array of topics, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism offers compelling evidence that the theory of evolution has become an act of faith rather than a functioning science, and that not until the scientific method is applied to it and the right questions are asked will we ever get the true answers to the mystery of life on Earth.

    “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” It is precisely this point that of a people faced with the end of their way of life that prompts the philosophical and ethical inquiry pursued in Radical Hope. In Jonathan Lear’s view, Plenty Coups’ story raises a profound ethical question that transcends his time and challenges us all: how should one face the possibility that one’s culture might collapse? This is a vulnerability that affects us all insofar as we are all inhabitants of a civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to historical forces. How should we live with this vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing up to such a challenge courageously? Using the available anthropology and history of the Indian tribes during their confinement to reservations, and drawing on philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Lear explores the story of the Crow Nation at an impasse as it bears upon these questions and these questions as they bear upon our own place in the world. His book is a deeply revealing, and deeply moving, philosophical inquiry into a peculiar vulnerability that goes to the heart of the human condition.

    They promised themselves and each other that every day would be an amazing day. They even stuck that phrase--"Amazing Days"--on their refrigerator, like Martin Luther pounding his conviction into a door and launching the next great era of the church. "Ready or not," they told the world, "here we come." They traveled the planet, doing missions and community development work in Latin America, China, Africa. Then they went back home--to the land of shopping malls and manicured lawns. And they wondered what had become of their amazing days. InThis Ordinary Adventure Adam and Christine Jeske mine their experience, from riding motorcycles in Africa to dicing celery in Wisconsin, in search of a God who is always present and who is charging every moment with potential. Read along and you'll see your life--your ruts and routines, your frustrations and exhilarations--through different eyes, maybe for the first time. You'll discover the amazing things God is doing in the shadows of even the most ordinary day.

    Questioning the beliefs of the world's eminent evolutionists.

    He is also the Head Teaching Fellow for the most popular course at Harvard, “Positive Psychology,” which is taken by more than 1,000 students per semester and led by Professor Tal Ben-Shahar.  Shawn received his B.A. in English from Harvard and a Master’s from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist Ethics. Part of his interest in positive psychology stems from a troubling fact: studies have shown that many of Harvard’s undergraduates suffer from depression at some point in their college careers. One Day University is a unique educational experience  that brings intellectuals together to learn from top rated professors at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and other prestigious universities. Chosen for their excellent teaching abilities as rated by their students, these great thinkers represent a wide variety of academic disciplines and share their knowledge in 60 minute, highly entertaining lectures. Offering the ability to learn the highlights of academic thought in world affairs, politics, history, science, art, and more; One Day University is a way to truly enjoy the thrill of learning without the pressures of tests and the high price tag of college tuition. Once reserved only for students who could attend the lectures in New York and other major cities, One Day University courses are now available to everyone from the comfort of their own homes in Kindle format.

    The Oracle of Delphi was one of the most influential figures in ancient Greece. Human mistress of the god Apollo, she had the power to enter into ecstatic communion with him and deliver his prophesies to men. Thousands of years later, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist William J. Broad follows a crew of enterprising researchers as they sift through the evidence of history, geology, and archaeology to reveal—as far as science is able—the source of her visions.